Tips to troubleshoot your technical SEO

October 28, 2017

There are lots of articles filled with checklists that tell you what technical SEO items you should review on your website. This is not one of those lists. What I think people need is not another best practice guide, but some help with troubleshooting issues.

info: search operator

Often, [info:https://www.domain.com/page] can help you diagnose a variety of issues. This command will let you know if a page is indexed and how it is indexed. Sometimes, Google chooses to fold pages together in their index and treat two or more duplicates as the same page. This command shows you the canonicalized version — not necessarily the one specified by the canonical tag, but rather what Google views as the version they want to index.

If you search for your page with this operator and see another page, then you’ll see the other URL ranking instead of this one in results — basically, Google didn’t want two of the same page in their index. (Even the cached version shown is the other URL!) If you make exact duplicates across country-language pairs in hreflang tags, for instance, the pages may be folded into one version and show the wrong page for the locations affected.